You get to save $10 so Nintendo can later take it off their marketplace, and remove your access to the game.
The shitty part is that I don’t think physical games are even exempt from that problem. Excluding whichever Switch 2 games are use the “key card” option versus “memory card” (key card basically just being a transferrable download code), we see games like Tears of the Kingdom being nearly unplayable without the day 1 patch. Or other games like Splatoon 3 that simply don’t include the full game on the cart and prompt you to download launch-day content after booting it up.
Neither of these games will be very playable even with physical cards once the Switch eShop servers go down for good.
We can only hope the current standard of backwards compatibility lasts indefinitely so all digital stores can basically be like Steam going forward and keep their content available across all future generations. But even that is a stretch when who even knows what the state of CPU architecture will look like in 15-20 years.
The shitty part is that I don’t think physical games are even exempt from that problem. Excluding whichever Switch 2 games are use the “key card” option versus “memory card” (key card basically just being a transferrable download code), we see games like Tears of the Kingdom being nearly unplayable without the day 1 patch. Or other games like Splatoon 3 that simply don’t include the full game on the cart and prompt you to download launch-day content after booting it up.
Neither of these games will be very playable even with physical cards once the Switch eShop servers go down for good.
We can only hope the current standard of backwards compatibility lasts indefinitely so all digital stores can basically be like Steam going forward and keep their content available across all future generations. But even that is a stretch when who even knows what the state of CPU architecture will look like in 15-20 years.